It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.
If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.
(via Hit and Run, who point out the similarities to Hindu cosmology).
If I read this correctly, this theory is seen more as a problem in the same vein as Schrodinger’s Cat – ie, not a “proof” that this is the way the universe is, but as evidence that current theories are insufficient. None the less, I’m sure it, like Schrodinger’s Cat, will be used “scientific evidence” of all sorts of nonsense.
January 16, 2008 at 1:16 pm
“If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.”
Well…that’s a relief.
January 19, 2008 at 1:47 pm
http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/01/thus_spaketh_dennis_overbye_on.php